Active Endpoints' Alex Neihaus points me to a post by his CTO Michael Rowley entitled "Which is simpler: BPMN or BPEL?" I'm groaning before I even read it, because I know where Michael is headed. Right off a cliff, in my view. Their product ActiveVOS is one of the first to support BPMN 2.0 diagrams, but they use it to create BPEL. Such a use was actually anticipated by the developers of BPMN 2.
I should have known that disputing Michael Rowley's contention that mapping BPMN to BPEL was "simpler" than a straight BPMN 2.0 solution would invite a further response. Two, actually, one from Michael and another from Frank Leymann. Hmmm. In a room with those two, I'm at best the third smartest guy. But unlike the "stacker-bashing" flame wars of 2008, their points are well stated and sort of illuminating. Anyway I can't resist taking another shot.
[My June column for BPMInstitute.org] As BPM begins to expand beyond isolated projects to mainstream programs at the division or enterprise level, there is a need to engage a far greater number of business people in the effort. That's not easy, and achieving it is going to require significant change in the way BPM is practiced. The most important role for business is probably documenting current-state business processes and analyzing them for possible improvement.
IBM left a voicemail at 4:58am today about a 6am briefing to announce the acquisition of Lombardi. Thanks for the heads up, guys! Sandy Kemsley does her usual great job with the briefing play-by-play, which I would describe as predictably unrevealing, except for the fact that Lombardi will be brought into WebSphere/AIM instead of being hung out to dry on its own like FileNet. So I guess we're down to the punditry.
No other topic in the BPM arena has suffered from more misinformation, disinformation, and willful ignorance as the relationship between business process and business rules. These two disciplines are most often put forward as alternative approaches, rather than complementary aspects of managing the business. In reality, business process management (BPM) and business decision management (BDM) need to be used together. Unfortunately, each discipline has historically spoken only to its own concerns, with little interest in how it integrates with the other, in fact with little understanding of what the other is trying to do.
Well, sort of... By that I mean you can export a BPMN diagram from your Blueprint account to your desktop and import it into another BPMN tool, like Process Modeler for Visio, the tool I use in my BPMessentials training, or BizAGI (see screenshot). After months of my nagging Lombardi about the need for this, it popped up like a surprise gift in the July Blueprint release. You might think they always had this.
A reader asked me to comment on an interesting paper by the European BPM academics Mendling, Reijers, and van der Aalst entitled Seven Process Modeling Guidelines (7PMG). Like my book BPMN Method and Style, 7PMG is asking the right question: what are the principles of style that improve a model's chance "(1) to become comprehensible to various stakeholders and (2) to contain few syntactical errors." I don't completely agree with their recommendations.
I am a little surprised at the scores on my BPMN self-test. Ten questions, four diagrams each, one of which is the correct answer. The scenarios are typical from real-world processes, and most of the patterns should be used routinely in process models. A couple of questions are a little hard, but I would have thought that more people understood the basic usage of timer, message, and error events, event gateways, loop vs MI activities, etc.
[My July column for BPMInstitute.org] In these tough times, even the most change-resistant organizations are re-examining whether past practice should continue to govern standard operating procedures. Government and airlines, for example, spring to mind. Last week, I saw further evidence of this in delivering a BPMN training class to one of the many Federal agencies involved in financial regulation. I was surprised to find that most in the class were experienced process modelers already.
[My August column on BPMInstitute.org] BPMS Watch readers know I am a big fan of OMG's Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0, which has passed its first approval hurdle and is now in the Finalization Task Force stage. A major reason is that for the first time, BPMN has standardized the schema for XML interchange of process models. That means you will be able to create a BPMN model in one tool with confidence you can open it in a different tool.